The Rev. Dr A.A. Führer lived to the age ofseventy-seven. Herein is examined his first fortyyears. Trained as an Oriental Linguist, Führereventually found employment as a fieldarchaeologist. Three years after his appointment,the Archaeological Survey of India entered the worstcrisis of its existence. Führer reacted in waysincompatible with scholarly integrity. It remains tobe seen whether he committed further transgressionsand or forgeries during his final thirty-sevenyears.

This article introduces an English version (translator unknown) of a Burmese law report: Judge Hpo Hlaing's ruling in Ma Hla v. Ma Wa, delivered in Mandalay in 1877. The judgement contains a paragraph dealing with the sources of Buddhist Law which appears to be a riposte to work published earlier that year in Lower Burma. That the judge was Burma's leading political philosopher gives special resonance to his views on law. His list of five law reports from the Pali canon and related texts is of interest. A reading is advanced in which the five cases link to Burmese ideas about legal pluralism.

Attention is drawn to five parallel passages as between Francis Bacon's unpublished Aphorismi de jure gentium maiore sive de fontibus justiciae et juris and A discourse of laws, which was published anonymously in 1620. It is suggested that around 14 per cent of A discourse consists of unacknowledged translations from Bacon's Latin. Questions are raised as to when, where, and why A discourse was composed. These questions bear on, though fail to resolve, the debate over the identity of A discourse's author. The two names discussed most often in this connection are those of William Cavendish and Thomas Hobbes.

The fetal-origins hypothesis suggests that maternal and fetal nutrition can have a profound and sustained impact on the health of the offspring in adult life. Although there is abundant literature reporting on the associations between birth weight and disease risk factors, only a handful of studies have been able to examine the relationship between maternal nutrition in pregnancy with the health of offspring in adult life directly. Between 1942 and 1944, nearly 400 pregnant women were recruited into a dietary study to determine whether the wartime dietary rations were sufficient to prevent nutritional deficiencies. Detailed biochemical and clinical assessments were conducted for each of the women, who were followed-up until after delivery. More than 50 years later, approximately one-quarter of the adult offspring were recruited into a study to explore the possible impact of maternal nutrition in pregnancy on CHD risk factors, including glucose tolerance, blood pressure and components of the lipid profile. Results from the present study provide no evidence to support the hypothesis that birth weight or maternal nutrition in pregnancy are associated with CHD risk factors in adult life.

This article describes and compares English and Burmese approaches to the legal establishment of religion. Between 1886 and 1942 the two approaches crossbred to produce a body of case law known as Buddhist ecclesiastical law. However, after 1920 the colonial government radically changed its policy toward Buddhism. The repercussions of this change continue to affect Burma.

In 1782, the year of King Badon's coronation, someone close to the Burmese palace wrote a legal manuscript. This paper gives a translation of and commentary on that section of the manuscript dealing with kingship. By tracing the sources of the material used, it contributes to the debate about the sources of Burmese political philosophy. Was precolonial Burmese political thought primarily Hindu, primarily Buddhist, primarily Indian or none of the above?

Twenty years ago hardly any legal texts from the Middle Mekong region were known. Now more than a 150 legal manuscripts have been borrowed from monastery book-chests, cleaned and microfilmed. Only one of these discoveries has been translated into a non-Thai language, but that is a substantial and important text. Aroonrut Wichienkeeo's and Gehan Wijeyewardene's Laws of King Mangrai translates a manuscript from ‘The Elephant Supported Temple’ in Nan which Richard Davis arranged to be copied. Reviewing it in these pages I suggested that the MS has jumbled together four distinct works in two broad categories. The bulk of the text consists of rules about family, theft and compensation drawn from works called Worldly law and the law of Dhamma (§1–49) and Mangrai's Dhammathat (§50–76). The rest of the MS deals with legal precedents rather than rules and can be divided into a collection of judgement tales (title unknown) (§77–87) and The traditions of King Mahosot (§88–106). There are corruptions, lacunae and interpolations throughout, but the earlier sections can at least be checked against other recensions of Northern Thai law. That is not possible for the last 20 sections: there is nothing in the surviving literature remotely similar to The traditions of King Mahosot. In this paper I attempt to reconstruct the original intentions of its author on contextual grounds: knowing what we do about Middle Mekong legal culture, what is the most plausible reconstruction of this damaged, but fascinating, work? My main aim will have been met if I can make the text more accessible to legal and political historians.